The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33674Keywords:
Anthropocene, archaeology of the present, presentismAbstract
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce proposed that “every true history is a contemporary history”, meaning that any historical enquiry is basically a dialogue between present society and the past(s). Quite similarly, we may claim that “all true archaeology is an archaeology of the present”: this is not only because any archaeological approach to the past is undertaken from the present; more fundamentally, it is because, as an assemblage of material things, the present is made of all the remains of the past which are still surviving within the materiality of our present time. But what could this mean, an “archaeology of the present”? And how does it challenge the conventional archaeology that we have been taught to practice? Foremost, an archaeology of the present looks at things, observing how human activity has transformed – or is transforming – the materiality of the world around people. In doing so, such an approach is no longer directed towards the past in itself (seen as the temporality where the origins of everything take place); rather, it points towards the future, stressing all kinds of processes of emergence. Time, thus, is no longer uni-linear and sequential: developing in the long run, it becomes instead multi-linear and periodical – that is to say, filled with returns, survivals and disappearances. And contexts, also, are transformed, since, at every moment in time they may connect many different environments.References
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____. 2009. Le temps des crises. Paris: Le Pommier.
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____. 2006. La menace nucléaire. Considérations radicales sur l’âge atomique. French translation by C. David. Paris: Le Rocher.
Andreassen, E., H. B. Bjerck and B. Olsen. 2010. Persistent Memories: Pyramiden, A Soviet Mining Town in the Hight Artic. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press.
Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking.
Augé, M. 1992. Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Le Seuil.
Beck U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by M. Ritter. London: Sage.
Benjamin, W. 1999a. The Arcades Project. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
____. 1999b [1940]. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Translated by H. Arendt. In Illuminations, by W. Benjamin, 245–255. London: Picador.
Binford, L. R. 1983. In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record. London: Thames and Hudson.
Bonneuil, C. and J. B. Fressoz. 2016. L’Événement Anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous (2nd edition). Paris: Le Seuil.
Bonnichsen, R. 1973. “Millie’s Camp: An Experiment in Archaeology.” World Archaeology 4 (3): 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1973.9979539
Buchli, V. and G. Lucas. 2001. “The Archaeology of Alienation: A Late Twentieth-Century British Council House.” In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, edited by V. Buchli and G. Lucas, 158–167. London: Routledge.
Certeau, M. de 1987. Histoire et psychanalyse. Entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard.
Corcoran, P. L, C. J. Moore and K. Jazvac. 2014. “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record.” GSA Today 24 (6): 4–8. https://doi.org/10.1130/GSAT-G198A.1
Croce, B. 1920. Teoria e storia della storiografia. Bari: Gius. Laterza and Figli.
____. 1921. Theory and History of Historiography. Translated by D. Ainslie. London: George. G. Harrap.
Crutzen, P. J. and E. F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18.
____. and W. Steffen 2003. “How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change 61: 251–257. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:CLIM.0000004708.74871.62
Deschamps, F. 1996. “Igor Kostine, 59 ans, est l’homme qui a photographié Tchernobyl pendant dix ans. Les photos de son obsession sont aujourd’hui exposées à New York. Au coeur des ténèbres.” Libération, 28 May. Online: https://www.liberation.fr/portrait/1996/05/28/igor-kostine-59-ans-est-l-homme-qui-a-photographie-tchernobyl-pendant-dix-ans-les-photos-de-son-obse_170509
Descola, P. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
Faulkner, W. 1951. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House.
Felli, R. 2016. La Grande Adaptation. Climat, capitalisme et catastrophe. Paris: Le Seuil.
Foucault, M. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard.
Gonzalez-Ruibal, A. 2005. “The Need for a Decaying Past: An Archaeology of Oblivion in Contemporary Galicia (NW Spain).” Home Cultures 2 (2): 129–152. https://doi.org/10.2752/174063105778053355
____. 2008. “Time to Destroy. An Archaeology of Supermodernity.” Current Anthropology 49 (2): 247–279. https://doi.org/10.1086/526099
Guerrin, M. 2010. “Vingt-sept ans après, ‘Le Déjeuner sous l’herbe’, l’œuvre d’art de Spoerri, sort de terre”. Le Monde, 4 July. Online: https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2010/06/04/vingt-sept-ans-apres-le-dejeuner-sous-l-herbe-l-oeuvre-d-art-de-spoerri-sort-de-terre_1367804_3246.html
Gumbrecht, H. U. 2013. After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hamel, J.-F. 2006. Revenances de l’histoire. Répétition, narrativité, modernité. Paris: éditions de Minuit.
Hartog, F. 2003. Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Le Seuil.
Hodder, I. 1986. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, B. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: La Découverte, les empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Leibniz, G. 1989 [1714]. Philosophical Essays. Translated by R. Ariew and D. Gabber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
Lewis, S. L. and M. A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258
Olivier, L. 2011. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.
____. 2013a. “Nous sommes à l’âge de la Dévastation”. In Destruction: Archaeological, Philological and Historical Perspectives, edited by J. Driessen, 27–36. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
____. 2013b. “The Business of Archaeology is the Present.” In Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the tropes of Modernity, edited by A. Gonzalez-Ruibal, 117–129. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203068632.ch9
Olsen, B., M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore. 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520274167.001.0001
Rathje, W. 1974. “The Garbage Project: A New Way of Looking at the Problems of Archaeology.” Archaeology 27: 236–241.
Reinhard, A. 2015. “Excavating Atari: Where the Media was the Archaeology.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2 (1): 86–93. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v2i1.27108
Serres, M. 1982. Genèse. Paris: Bernard Grasset.
____. 2009. Le temps des crises. Paris: Le Pommier.
Steffen, W., J. Grinevald, P. J. Crutzen and J. R. McNeill. 2011. “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (1938): 842–867. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0327
Stengers, I. 2009. Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient. Paris: La Découverte, les empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Witmore, C. 2014. “Archaeology, the Anthropocene and the Hypanthropocene.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 1 (1): 128–132. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v1i1.128
Zalasiewicz, J., C. W. Waters, A. D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, M. A. Ellis, I. J. Fairchild, J. Grinevald, P. J. Haff, I. Hajdas, R. Leinfelder, J. McNeill, E. O. Odada, C. Poirier, D. Richter, W. Steffen and C. Summerhayes. 2015. “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level is Stratigraphically Optimal.” Quaternary International 383 (5): 196–203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045
Published
2019-06-26
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Section
Articles
How to Cite
Olivier, L. (2019). The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 6(1), 16-31. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33674
